


Shadowcat

by Daughter_of_Stories



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-25
Updated: 2016-05-25
Packaged: 2018-06-10 18:02:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6967531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Daughter_of_Stories/pseuds/Daughter_of_Stories
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kitty Pryde used to be a superhero, until she lost everything. But she's willing to put on the spandex one more time if it means getting revenge, and maybe some answers.</p>
<p>Tony Stark would like to believe that he's Merchant of Death days are behind him, and he's firmly on the side of good now. Kitty's not so ready to forgive and forget.</p>
<p>No previous X-Men knowledge required.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadowcat

**Author's Note:**

> Set after Winter Soldier, but goes AU before Age of Ultron, because fuck the idea that Wanda and Pietro are generic white Europeans who volunteered for Nazi experiments, and fuck whatever assholes at Marvel thought that was an okay thing to do.
> 
> Doesn't really fit anywhere in the comics timeline.

Kitty Pryde was in a good mood as she left her ti-chi class; relaxed, as she always was after a good workout. Most days, it was nice to get this workout alone, where no one was watching her and she could cut loose without worrying about what they might see, but it was nice, sometimes to practice with other people, even to teach them some of what she knew. It almost made her feel…

No. That wasn’t worth thinking about.

No one in the group, of course, was up to her standards, but you could only expect so much from a college club and besides, none of them asked questions about where she’d learned to fight or how she’d become so skilled. That was important.

Her good mood ended almost as soon as she walked out of the gym and heard the shouting: “Keep the humans safe from mutants!” “Human rights are for human beings!” “Get the muties off our street!”

Kitty shouldn’t have been surprised to see the gathering; such protests seemed much more common in the fear and chaos since the world had found out that HYDRA was still around. But knowing that didn’t mean she was prepared to deal with it. Kitty didn’t think she’d ever be prepared to face the people who didn’t want her to exist, or the fact that her school allowed them to organize on campus.

She tried to keep her face impassive as she walked past the hate group and the Mutant-Human Alliance meeting that they were protesting; not meeting anyone’s eye, ignoring both sides’ calls and the pamphlets that both groups tried to thrust in her face.

God, what they must think of me…

She knew what they’d think; knew what she’d have thought, before…

It’s not worth thinking about that, she reminded herself firmly. I’ve given enough.

“HYDRA wanted to wipe out the mutants,” one person called, managing to make herself heard above the clamor of voices. “Are you proud of agreeing with HYDRA?”

Once, Kitty would have grinned at the chutzpa. Now she lowered her head and walked faster, trying to ignore the cruelties and obscenities hurled in response.  
Every trace of her good mood had been completely destroyed by the time Kitty reached the door to her dorm room, even before she realized that she didn’t have her   
key.

“Of course not,” she muttered angrily. “Because I wouldn’t be responsible or anything…”

Alexis wouldn’t be in; she had a class. Just to be sure, Kitty banged on the door, and called, “Alexis, are you in? I forgot my key!”

When it was clear that Alexis was gone, Kitty glanced around carefully to make sure no one could see what she was about to do, and reached through the door to open it from the inside.

Her key was sitting in the center of her desk.

“Typical,” she muttered.

Alexis might have seen the key sitting there when she’d left; if she asked, Kitty would say that she’d gotten an extra key from the front desk.

Locking the door behind her, Kitty reached into the bottom of her closet and pulled out a suitcase that was just a bit heavier than it should have been if it were empty.  
Most suitcases with secret compartments had a hidden zipper or catch; some way to access the hidden goods. Kitty’s didn’t need one. She simply reached through the bag’s false bottom and pulled out a photograph.

She sank back against the wall, staring at the picture.

Looking back at Kitty was herself, but infinitely younger and surrounded by a group of… calling them friends didn’t do them justice.

A tall, regal black woman with long, white hair. An even taller man with dark hair and eyes, built like a brick wall but with a smile that showed how kind and gentle he was. A shorter man, almost as solidly built, with hair that looked sort of like the ears of a small animal and an expression which insisted he did not want to be here. Kitty knew better. 

A third man with ruby-red sunglasses and just a hint of a smile on his stern face. A red-headed woman, arm around the man’s waist and smiling broadly and warmly enough for both of them.

A bald man in a wheelchair, staring directly at the camera with fatherly pride.

And there, in front, an arm around Kitty’s waist and planting a brotherly kiss on her cheek, the most bizarre looking of them all: Cobalt blue and furry from his head to the tip of his pointed tail, three fingers on each hand, three toes on each foot.

With a sound that was half growl, half sob, Kitty flung the picture across the room. She would have to put it away before Alexis returned. It would not do to have her roommate see a picture of Kitty with a group of obvious mutants. It would lead to too many questions and, even if Kitty could have been certain that the answers wouldn’t change Alexis’ opinion of her at all, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to talk about it.  
Kitty sat there for a while; staring at the door, trying not to think, but she had a paper to write, so she sighed, dragged herself to her feet, returned the picture reverently to its place, and went to shower.

 

The next day was Saturday, which was a good thing, because Kitty really needed the time off. She left campus early in the morning, before Alexis was awake (making sure she had her keys with her this time) and climbed onto a bus. She rode for about an hour and walked for half an hour more before she reached the place she’d been looking for.

Most people, Kitty reflected, would not feel so comfortable among a bunch of warehouses, especially on the weekend when no one else was here.

But Kitty wasn’t most people; these buildings help a great many memories for her; surprisingly pleasant memories, given how violent most of them were. Besides, sometimes, a girl just needed to be alone.

Or not entirely alone, as Kitty heard a very familiar screeching noise.

“Lockheed?” she laughed. “How did you know I’d be here?”

The same way her alien dragon friend (Kitty was definitely not “most people”) always knew where she was, Kitty guessed, as the purple lizard flew down in front of her. She frowned; it must have taken over an hour to fly here from Xavier’s.

She grabbed the dragon and pulled him to her chest in a desperate hug. “You shouldn’t have come,” she whispered. “You should have just stayed with the other X-men. I’m not coming back.”

Lockheed looked at her reproachfully. He wouldn’t want to stay with the other X-men; Kitty was the one he’d followed back to Earth after they’d found him on an alien planet, the only survivor of his species. (Kitty’s life was weird.)

Kitty had wondered, when she’d first met Lockheed, how she always seemed to be able to understand him, even though he didn’t have the articulatory organs needed to speak any human language, and how he could understand her even though no one had ever taught him English. At first she’d thought he must have some sort of low-level telepathy. Then she’d decided it didn’t really matter.

Lockheed was an old friend—one of the few old friends she still spoke to regularly, and that only because he kept finding her.

Kitty sighed. “I wish you could live in my dorm with me,” she told the dragon, “but it’s not really conducive to the whole ‘secret identity’ thing. Besides, my RA would totally freak out.”

Lockheed purred and rubbed against her. He didn’t like it, but he understood.

“Thanks,” Kitty said quietly. “You’re the best dragon a girl could ask for.”

An ear-splitting roar rent the quiet day, and Kitty spun around just in time to see a huge green creature leap over her head. He was followed closely by a figure Kitty didn’t recognize but who, from his costume, was definitely either a superhero or a supervillain. Kitty was guessing villain; she did recognize the Hulk, and she’d been in enough battles to know what it looked like when a villain was herded somewhere the destructive fighting couldn’t hurt any bystanders.

Sure enough, several other Avengers were in hot pursuit, and Kitty ducked into a building’s shadow so as not to be seen.

Lockheed growled softly, but Kitty shook her head. “You can do what you want,” she whispered, “I’m not interfering. It’s not my fight.”

Lockheed growled again, disappointed and a bit angry, and shot off without her.

Kitty should have left then. This was none of her business, and she didn’t want to take the risk of being seen and recognized. But none of the Avengers knew Lockheed; what if they thought he was an enemy?

She sank back into the wall of the warehouse and waited.

It wouldn’t be a long battle; very few villains had any business taking on the Avengers, and this guy was not one of them. The bolts he threw from his hands exploded whenever they hit something and cause a lot of damage, but he was hopelessly outclassed. 

Lockheed had not made his presence known to the Avengers, seeming content to stay back unless they seemed to need him, and they certainly did not. Kitty was about to get far away from the situation when everything went to hell.

It had to have been a lucky shot; the guy was trying to hit Iron Man and failing miserably, but one of his missed shots flew past and into the wall of the warehouse Hawkeye had perched on top of. The building collapsed under him, and then over him.

“Hawkeye!” Captain America cried, even as Black Widow took down the villain with a move that had to be extremely painful.

Hulk roared angrily and flung himself toward the collapsed building. He grabbed an enormous slab of wall—

“Hulk, no!”

“Cupid trapped!” Hulk growled at Iron Man angrily, though he did not move the slab. 

“Hulk help!”

“That pile is unstable,” Iron Man insisted hastily. “If you move any part of it, it could crush him.”

“Does he yet live?” Thor asked anxiously, landing beside his teammates.

“I’m picking up his vital signs,” Iron Man said, his voice betraying his worry, “but I’m also seeing a ton of instability in those rocks. They could collapse at any moment.”

By now, Black Widow and Captain America had joined the rest of the team, the unconscious villain at their feet. 

“Do you see any way to dig Hawkeye out without injuring him further?” Captain America asked. 

“I’m working; I’m working,” Iron Man growled, but he didn’t sound hopeful.

Kitty cursed. She should have left when she had the chance; retired or not, she couldn’t ignore someone who needed help. 

With one more curse, she darted forward past five startled superheroes and into the crumbled wall.

There was a space not far in where the falling building had formed a sort of cavern; very little light was able to make its way in, but Kitty’s eyes adjusted, and she soon saw the fallen hero. Hawkeye was awake, but in bad shape. His right arm and part of his right leg were pinned under an enormous slab of concrete and there was a gash over his eye that was bleeding heavily. His quiver was pinned under his back and his bow lay just a few feet beyond his reach.

When Kitty came in through the solid rock, Hawkeye groaned and squinted at what he must have thought was a hallucination. 

“I think I hit my head,” he said, his words slurred. 

“Yeah, I can see that,” Kitty told him absentmindedly as she looked at his leg. “Do you think you can walk?”

Hawkeye blinked at her. “…My hearing aids are broken,” he said finally.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Kitty muttered. Well, at least she knew ASL.

“If I can get you out from under that rock,” she said, exaggerating her lip movements and signing as she spoke, “do you think you could walk out of here?”

Hawkeye blinked again, slowly. Definitely concussed. “I guess so,” he said after a moment. “If there wasn’t so much solid stone in the way.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Kitty told him, glancing around one last time to make sure she wasn’t missing anything. Then she slung the bow over her back and knelt down next to the injured man.

“I’m going to take some of your weight,” she said and signed, “and then I need you to stand up.”

Hawkeye blinked at her again. “…I’m still pinned,” he pointed out, “and I think I might know you. Do I know you?”

“Just do it,” Kitty snapped, forgetting to sign. Damn it, she did not want to be recognized…

But this wasn’t helping anyone, so she forced herself to smile reassuringly and pointed out, “the worst that could happen is nothing,” before carefully pulling Hawkeye’s uninjured arm over her shoulders and putting her own arm around his back.

Hawkeye stared at her incredulously, but did attempt to stand—and nearly fell again as he realized that he was standing through the stone.

“It’s okay,” Kitty assured him, her face turned toward his so that he could read her lips. 

“You do get used to it. Let’s just get out of here.”

“You get used to the feeling of solid rock moving through you?” Hawkeye asked, leaning heavily on Kitty’s shoulder, but walking slowly nonetheless.

Kitty just smiled.

“This is weird,” Hawkeye muttered as he stepped into the collapsed wall. “I’m getting very familiar with weird, and this is really weird.”

And then they were out.

“Clint!” Black Widow exclaimed as they emerged. “Are you alright?”

“His arm is probably broken, but I don’t think his leg is,” Kitty told the Avengers, making herself and the archer corporeal just long enough to let Captain America take his weight and then phasing again as she added, “Also, I’m pretty sure he has a concussion.”

“We owe you our thanks, Lady,” Thor told her. “But who are you?”

“I have to go,” Kitty said instead of answering, and she turned and ran not stopping even when she felt Iron Man’s hand pass through her and short out.

 

“Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid,” Kitty muttered as she stomped back into her dorm room. She was trying to be anonymous, damn it. She was trying to stay under the radar. She wasn’t one of the conspiracy theorists who believed that one or more Avenger was still with HYDRA or any of that bullshit, but she was also far too experienced to fully trust them, and just because Hawkeye was too concussed to recognize her didn’t mean none of the others would, and once they knew who she was, they would have no trouble finding her…

But Kitty also knew that there was nothing else she could have done, once she’d realized Hawkeye was in danger. At this point, she would just have to deal with whatever happened.

Needing something to distract her, and feeling that now was as good a time as any, she pulled out her external hard drive and opened the enormous file that had filled it to capacity. The SHIELD information dump had, of course, been pulled from the internet as soon as the CIA and FBI had been made aware of it, but Kitty knew that she wasn’t the only one who’d downloaded as much of the file as possible beforehand. In the months since, she’d been slowly sifting through the information. It was probably unhealthy, but Kitty couldn’t keep herself from looking for anything and everything HYDRA’d had on her and her teammates. 

It had been clear fairly quickly that HYDRA had planned to wipe out all mutants as potential threats; that much had made the news. But Kitty knew there must be more that hadn’t, and while she’d found a few files on the X-Men, they’d been oddly clinical, lacking even really names. Kitty couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something else, something that she hadn’t seen yet…

Kitty was scanning through the pages on her screen when familiar words caught her eye. Her mouth went dry as she realized what the file was about, but she forced herself to keep reading, even though she knew exactly what the file was going to say.  
Except that it didn’t… that wasn’t what had happened… that wasn’t…. Kitty dimly realized that her hands were shaking as the full implications of the file hit her.  
She couldn’t bring herself to care. 

Kitty pushed the curtain back and focused her binoculars. Step one, getting into a top floor office in a building next to Stark Tower, had been almost depressingly easy. 

You’d think people would have the sense to invest in a bit of mutant-specific security, but she wasn’t going to complain when their stupidity made her life easier.

Now it was just a matter of patience, making sure that the two Avengers she was looking for were both home….

It wouldn’t do to jump the gun on this one. Kitty probably wouldn’t get a second chance.

Finally, she heard the Avengers’ jet approaching and watched it land on the roof. She scowled as she realized that she couldn’t see who had gotten off, but the jet didn’t show any signs that it was going to launch again, so it was probably all of them. It would have been nice to have visual confirmation, but this was probably the best Kitty was going to get.

Time for phase two: Gripping a metal pole in one hand and a rolled up blueprint in the other, Kitty stepped through the window and into the sky, walking across the open air toward Stark Towers.

She’d planned out her route fairly carefully and knew that no one would be able to see her from the windows of the top floors of the tower that served as the Avengers’ base. 

People in other buildings might see her, but they wouldn’t be able to stop her.

Not in time, anyway.

Kitty reached the tower and grinned slightly. Stark, at least, seemed to have taken metahumans into account when constructing his security, as a force field blocked anyone who wouldn’t be kept out by walls, but Kitty had been bypassing such measures since she was fourteen. A moment’s concentration to shift the molecules in her body to a slightly different frequency, and she was in.

She found herself on the top floors of the office levels of Stark Towers, and began the steady climb to the top floor. She met with another force field as she reached the level with all of Stark’s laboratories, and another as she crossed to the residential floor, but nothing that slowed her down significantly. As she approached her goal, however, she heard a voice say, “Sir, there is an intruder inside the building interfering with my security systems.”

Damn. So apparently she’d shorted out something in a wall and been noticed because of it. Still, she was close enough to her goal that it didn’t matter. She heard Stark on the other side of the wall addressing someone called Jarvis and, before she could hear what he had to say, she ran straight through the wall, ignoring the startled exclamations around her as she ran single-mindedly toward her goal and thrust the metal pole, currently as immaterial as she was, straight into his stomach.

Then she stopped, breathing heavily and staring right into his wary and confused eyes as she used the skills she’d developed over years as a superhero to take full stock of her surroundings without losing her awareness of Stark’s every move.

She was in what appeared to be a large living room or foyer with a bar along one wall (not exactly surprising) and another wall made entirely out of glass. If the one man Kitty didn’t recognize was Bruce Banner, the entire Avengers was present, most in civilian attire and holding plates or glasses, though several of these had been dropped when she’d appeared. It was also possible he was the aforementioned Jarvis, though a slightly mechanical tone in the voice she’d heard made Kitty suspect that he had been speaking from a different room via intercom.

No matter; even if the Hulk was unaccounted for, not even he could touch Kitty while she was phased.

Most of the Avengers had tensed or shifted into battle positions. Captain America made as if to step forward and speak to Kitty, but Black Widow—the only Avenger to seem entirely unaffected by Kitty’s presence—made a quick, subtle gesture, and he stopped.

“Hello, Shadowcat,” Black Widow said, as though nothing about this situation was strange, “I wasn’t sure we’d get a chance to thank you for helping Hawkeye.”

Kitty ignored the comment and instead said, “If you know who I am, than you know that any attempt to stop me by force will either be totally ineffectual or will result in this metal pole materializing, at which point its molecules will fuse with any solid objects already occupying that space—like, say, internal organs? 

“I’ve never actually seen it happen, but I assume it’s be messy. Might even explode.”

“But I know who you are,” Black Widow countered, “and I know you’re not a murderer.”

“If I get what I want,” Kitty told her, “No one will die. But if Stark does die, I won’t shed any tears.”

“Okay,” Stark cut in, raising his hands in a way that he probably thought was placating, “you’re too young for me to have slept with you and never called, so what could I have possibly done to piss you off this badly?”

“New rule,” Hawkeye said from somewhere behind Kitty, “when former superheroes are threatening to kill Stark, he’s not allowed to talk.”

“It is a fair question,” Captain America said in what was probably his Reasonable Voice. “What is this about?”

Not really trusting herself to speak, Kitty dropped the blueprints, which materialized as soon as they left her hands. 

Probably-Banner stepped forward cautiously and examined the pages. “It’s… a robot?” he said hesitantly, turning the blueprints so that Stark could see them.

“It’s a genocide machine,” Kitty ground out.

“It’s called a Sentinel,” Stark told his team. “I designed it.”

**Author's Note:**

> I first met Kitty Pryde when I was a fourteen year old Jewish girl who didn't really fit in with her peers, partly because she was too smart for her own good. Needless to say, Kitty's pretty important to me.
> 
> This, therefore, is my way of adding Kitty to the MCU. I'm pretty new to this site, so expect tags to change a bit.


End file.
